Inefficiency of business meetings poses a major challenge for enterprise and personal productivity. According to expert estimates, millions of corporate and organizational meetings occur in the United States daily. On average, employees spend 20-40% of their time in the meetings, while upper managers dedicate up to 80-90% of their time resources to meetings.
Multiple surveys agree in their findings that only a relatively small percent of the meetings (45-50%, by some estimates) are considered efficient by the majority of their participants. Accordingly, there is a shared belief among time management professionals that nearly 50% of employee time in the meetings is wasted. This is confirmed by many polls: thus, 47% of 3,200 employees participating in a 2012 work efficiency survey identified corporate meetings as the single leading time-wasting factor. It is estimated that inefficiency of corporate meetings causes multi-billion dollar business losses every year.
Experts in various areas of business efficiency are dissecting problems facing meeting productivity in many different ways. Overall, a significant number of researchers agree that two factors related to enterprise information management rank top on the list of issues causing extensive waste of time at and between meetings: the first factor is insufficient preparedness by meeting organizers, participants and leaders and the second factor is poor compilation and distribution of meeting materials. According to one survey on meeting efficiency, for two thirds of repetitive business meetings, no relevant materials are distributed to meeting participants, who are left guessing about the meeting specifics and remain confused about decisions made at the meetings. The same survey has discovered that around 63% of repetitive meetings do not always have meeting minutes produced, while almost 40% of the existing meeting minutes take over a week to get delivered to the target audience. Subsequently, meeting results and follow-up actions also remain unknown to many participants and other involved personnel. These shortcomings in organization and follow-up of business meetings call for a significant improvement in creating and distributing adequate meeting materials.
Smartphones have long become pervasive mobile devices and are playing an increasing role in scheduling and tracking business meetings. It can be safely assumed that for the vast majority of modern corporate and organizational meetings, nearly 100% of their participants own one or another model of a smartphone and bring their mobile device (or multiple devices) to every meeting. Smartphones and other mobile devices such as phablets or larger tablet devices are used by meeting participants on a regular basis to receive scheduling information, access meeting agenda, capture various visual aspects of meetings via smartphone cameras, such as whiteboard content, take typed and handwritten notes, etc. Some participants also record meeting audio on their smartphones.
Notwithstanding significant progress in capturing meeting materials, an important component of in-person and remote meetings, an adequate audio recording, remains underdeveloped. Only a small number of conference facilities are equipped with high-end audio conferencing and recording equipment, including distributed microphones. But even with such equipment, meeting speech segmentation and speaker diarization (determining who spoke when) represent difficult tasks and complicate processing audio recordings of meetings by their recipients. Accordingly, post-processing of recorded audio materials, adding voice and other annotations, handling simultaneous talk by several participants and voice-to-text transcription of meeting results, compiling a consistent storyline for distribution to participants and others may become a difficult and time consuming task and may further contribute to delays in meeting follow-up.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide high quality audio recording of meeting without expensive equipment, allowing speaker identification, easy annotation and voice-to-text conversion.